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Return-Path: amdcad!cayman.AMD.COM!steveg@decwrl.dec.com Date: Mon, 11 Jun 90 13:23:30 CDT From: steveg@cayman.amd.com (Steve Guccione) To: rms@sugar-bombs.ai.mit.edu Subject: Free Coffee Foundation (Copy) Cc: steveg@cayman.amd.com

		The Coffee Manifesto

(Copying permission notice at the end.)

What's Coffee? Its a popular, brown liquid stimulant.

I have set up a coffee pot in my cubicle for people who enjoy coffee, and want more quality and variety than the corporate-sponsored coffee service provides. Several other volunteers are helping me. Contributions of time, money, coffee and equipment are greatly needed.

So far we have a Proctor-Silex 10 cup coffee pot, and about five different types of coffee, some sugar cubes, some non-dairy creamer and 2500 plastic stirrers. We hope to supply, eventually, everything useful that normally comes with a Coffee system, and more.

How Coffee Will Be Available

Coffee is not in the public domain. Everyone will be permitted to make and drink coffee, but no one will be allowed to restrict its further redistribution. That is to say, proprietary coffee will not be allowed. I want to make sure that all coffee brewed remains free.

Why Many Other Coffee Drinkers Want to Help

I have found many other Coffee drinkers who are excited about the Free Coffee Foundation and want to help.

Many coffee drinkers are unhappy about the in house coffee system. It may enable them to drink more coffee, but it requires them to drink the same type of coffee every day.

How You Can Contribute

I am asking coffee drinkers for donations of machines, coffee, supplies and money.

One consequence you can expect if you donate coffee is that you will be able to drink it during the work day. The coffee machines should be complete, ready to use systems, approved for use in a residential area, and not in need of sophisticated cooling or power.

Why All Coffee Drinkers Will Benefit

Once coffee is made, everyone will be able to obtain good coffee.

The complete coffee system will be available to everyone. As a result, a coffee drinker who wants a different brand of coffee will always be free to make it himself. Coffee drinkers will no longer be at the mercy of one company which owns the coffee machine and is in sole position sell us their coffee.

Finally, the overhead of considering who owns the coffee system and what one is or is not entitled to do with it will be lifted.

Arrangements to make people pay for coffee always incur a tremendous cost to society through the cumbersome mechanisms necessary to figure out how much a person must pay for. And only a police state can force everyone to obey them. Consider a space station where air must be manufactured at great cost: charging each breather per liter of air may be fair, but wearing the metered gas mask all day and all night is intolerable even if everyone can afford to pay the air bill. And the TV cameras everywhere to see if you ever take the mask off are outrageous. It's better to support the air plant with a head tax and chuck the masks.

Drinking coffee is as natural as breathing, and as productive. It ought to be as free.

In the long run, the FCF is a step toward the post-scarcity world, where nobody will have to work very hard just to be able to drink coffee. People will be free to devote themselves to activities that are fun, such as programming, after spending the necessary ten hours a week on required tasks such as legislation, family counseling, robot repair and asteroid prospecting.

We have already greatly reduced the amount of work that the whole society must do for its actual productivity, but only a little of this has translated itself into leisure for workers because much nonproductive activity is required to accompany productive activity. The main causes of this are bureaucracy and isometric struggles against competition. Free coffee will greatly reduce these drains in the area of coffee services. We must do this, in order for technical gains in productivity to translate into less work and better coffee for us.

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